English Literature 1340-1660

Prologue

The narrator opens the General Prologue with a description of the return of spring. He describes the April rains,

the burgeoning flowers ( fiori che sbocciano) and leaves, and the chirping birds. The narrator says that, around this

time of the year, people begin to feel the desire to go on a pilgrimage. Many devout English pilgrims choose to

travel to Canterbury to visit the relics of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where they can thank the

martyr for having helped them when they were in need. The narrator tells us that as he was preparing to go on

such a pilgrimage, staying at a tavern called the Tabard Inn, a great company of 29 travelers entered. The

travelers were a diverse group who, like the narrator, were on their way to Canterbury. They happily agreed to let

him join them. That night, the group slept at the Tabard, and woke up early the next morning to set off on their

journey. Before continuing the tale, the narrator declares the intent to list and describe each of the members of the

group.

Miracle and Mistery Plays

Definition: a sequence or cycle of plays based on the Bible and produced by the city guilds, the organizations

representing the various traders and crafts. Only the cycles of York and Chester towns have bene preserved.

Medieval mistery plays had an immensely confident reach in both space and time. In York, for example, the

theatrical space and time of this urban drama was that of the e tigre city, lasting from sunrise through the entire

summer holiday. The time represented ran from the Fall of the Angels and the Creation of the world, till the Last

Judgement. Between these extremities of the beginning and end of time, each cycle presents key episodes of Old

Testament narrative.

The church had its own drama in latin; the vernacular drama evolved from the liturgical, passing by stages from

the church into the streeets of the town.

During the late 14th and 15th centuries, the Great English mystery cycles were formed in provincial cities

developed by city guilds. A guild was also known as a mistery, from latin ministerium, from where the name mistery

play. The performance and staging required significant investments of time and money and often, the subject of

the play corresponded to the function of the guild. In some of the cities each guild had a wagon that served ad a

stage. The wagon proceeded from one strategic point in the city to another, and the play was performed a number

of times on the same day. So, the cycles were public spectacles watched by every layer and they prepared the

way for the professional theater in the Age of Elizabeth the first.

Middle English lyrics - the Cuckoo Song

Only late 14th century English began to develop an aristocratic and formal lyric that had been cultivated on the

Continent by the Troubador poets in the south of France or the italian poets characterized by the Dolce Stil nuovo.

Chaucer, under the influence of French poets, wrote lovers' complaints, poetry and verse letters in the form of

ballades, roundels and other lyric types. Chaucer, his predecessors and their followers were familiar with and

influenced by an ancient tradition of popular songe from which only a small fraction survives. The middle English

lyrics are the work of anonymous poets and are difficult to date. The topics and language in these poems are

highly conventional, but they also seem fresh and spontaneous. Many are marked by strong accentual rhythms

with alliteration. Some were set to music, perhaps one of the earliest, the "Cuckoo Song" is a canon or round in

which the voices follow one another and join together echoing the joyous cry cuckoo.

Everyman

It is an example of medieval drama known as morality play. Morality plays were composed indivudually and they

dramatized allegories of spiritual struggle. Typically, a person named Human or mankind or youth is faced with a

choice between a pious life in company with Mercy, Discretion and Good Deeds and a dissolute life among riotous

companions like Lust or Mischief. Everyman is about the day of Judgement that every individual must face

eventually. The play represents the forces, both outside and within the protagonist, that can help to save Everyman

and those that cannot or that obstruct his salvation. The play contains a certain humour in showing the haste with

which the hero's friends abandon him when they discover his problem. The play inculcates its austere lesson by

the simplicity and directness of its language and of its approach. At the end, Knowledge teaches the lesson that

every Christian must learn in order to be saved. It was written near the end of the 15th century.

Sir Thomas More

More was one of the most important writer of the English Renaissance. The catholic church made him a saint,

communists celebrated his book Utopia as a forerunner of their plan to abolish private property and middle-class

liberals have admired his vision of free public education and freedom of thought. But, at the same time catholic

bishops of 16th century Spain and Portugal placed Utopia on their list of prohibited books, Karl Marx did not accept

More's ideas that he labelled as utopian and liberals have noticed that More embraced the idea of the forced labor

camp.

He studied at Oxford where he was torn between a career as a lawyer, as his father was, and a life of religious

devotion. He tried both of them. After his law studies, he gave a series of public lectures on Saint Augustine's work.

He also had a passion for Greek and Latin literature, a passion that he shared with his colse friend Erasmus of

Rotterdam.

For More, the love of playful, subversive wit culminated in Utopia, which he began in 1515. The book displays the

strong influence of Plato's Republic, but it is also shaped by more contemporary influences such ad monastic

communities, emerging market societies, peasant's rebels and voyages, especially those of Amerigo Vespucci.

Those voyages showed a world seemengly free of inequality and economic exploitation.

Utopia

Book 2 of Utopia, that More composed as first, describes in detail the laws and customs of a country that is similar

to England, but, indeed, it is very different: these was the abolition of money and private property, and the parasitic

classes - nobles, lawyers, idle priests and rapacious soldiers - have been eliminated. In Utopia, a well ordered

political democracy, education is free and universal, instead of oppressed peasants there are prosperous collective

farms. There are rational cities with free hospitals and child care. There is work for everybody and also a lot of time

for all citizens to pursue the arts of peace and the pleasures of the mind and the body.

The picture of England in book 1 of Utopia - with beggars in the streets and hungry farmers, makes the sharpest

contrast with the ordered and peaceable state described in book 2. Yet, book 1 is not a call for revolutionary social

reform. It is a meditation, in the form of a dialogue, on the question of whether intellectuals should involve

themselves in politics. The two speakers in the dialogue are a traveler named Raphael Hythloday and someone

named Thomas More, who closely resembles but pehaps should not be identified with the real More. More thinks

that Hythloday, with his extraordinary learning experience and high principles, should offer his services as a

councilor to one of the great monarch of Europe. Hythloday thinks that kings would never dream of adopting the

radical policies such ad the abandonment of warfare and the abolition of private property. In the dialogue,

Hythloday is the idealist, unwilling to dirty his hands in a pointless cause, while More is the sincere pragmatist,

prepared to compromise with the system and seek to change it from within rather than five up of any possibility of

action. In Book 1, the debate between the two has no clear winner, but not long after completing Utopia, the real

Thomas More entered the council of Henry VIII.

Book 2, Hythloday's narrative of his visit to Utopia, is also a form of dialogue and it is also a complex and

ambiguous meditation on the nature of the ideal Commonwealth. The dialogue form encourages the reader to

register the disturbing ungerside of More's island Commonwealth: Utopia is a society that rests upon slavery, there

is no variety in dress or housing or cityscape, no privacy. Citizens are encouraged to value pleasure, but they arte

constantly monitored. There is nominal freedom of thought, and toleration of religious diversity but still the priests

can punish people for "impiety".

If there is a deep ambivalence in More's attitude toward Utopia, there is no comparable ambivalence in the other

great work he wrote at the same time.

John Lyly

After receiving the degree at Oxford, Lyly went to London where his prose romance Euphues was an instant

success. Subsequently, he wrote several and elegant plays acted at court by the children's companies. The title

Euphues, taken from the name of that book's hero, is Greek and means graceful, witty, while the subtitle, Anatomy

of Wit, means something like "analysis of the mental faculties". The plot of work involves a young man who leaves

university for the temptation of the city, falls in love, betrays his best friend, is in turn betrayed, repents, and so

shows great quantities of mortal wisdom. But the plot is secondary to the prose style which has come to be known

as Euphuism. It has two characteristics: an elaborate sentence structure based on comparison and antithesis, and

a lot of ornament including proverbs and imagination.

Edmund Spenser - The Shepheardes Calendar

Pastoral poetry, with its idea of shepherds piping on their flutes and singing songs of love, sadness and complaint

was an influential classical form. The singers were rustics who inhabited a world in which human beings and

nature lived in harmony, but the form was always urban. The rustic mask also allowed Spenser to make satirical

comments on controversial religious and political issues of his day, such as Elizabeth's suppression of Puritan

clergy in the Church of England. The 12 eclogues of the Shepheardes Calendar are titled for the months of the

year, each one is prefaced by an illustration representing the characters and theme of the poem and picturing the

sign of the zodiac for that month, and each is accompanied by a commentary ascribed to E.K. who also wrote an

introduction. This E.K. Must have been someone close to Spenser, or Spenser himself. "October" deals with the

place of poetry and the responsibility of the poet in the world, an important theme throughout the Calender and in

much of Spenser's work.

The Faerie Queene

In a letter to Sir Walter Relegh, which appears in the first edition of The Faerie Queen, in 1590, Spenser describes

his exuberant poem as an allegory and invites us to interpret the characters and adventurers in the several books

in terms of the particular virtues and vices they enact or come to embody; so, the Redcrosse Knight in Book 1 is

the knight of Holiness; Sir Guyon in Book2 is the knight of Temperance; the female knight Britomart in Book 3 is

the knight of Chastity. The heroes of Books 4, 5 and 6 rep